He took a bit of “synthetic skin” from his case and got a very violent reaction. On the grid, the thing was an allergy product of a plant. And when he had run through twenty alkaloids, working slowly because of his impoverishment in equipment, he knew what it was.
Ragweed pollen!
He went outside and looked thoughtfully at the town below.
The beams were sufficient to carry jets of it far beyond the town limits and the winds would do more. To the east was a large expanse of greenhouse glass and a monocular told him it was surrounded by Persephon guards and a high electrified fence. Common sense told him that ragweed was grown there in large quantities.
“Well?” said Tinoi. “Ain’t I ever going to get that drink?”
“You were right,” said Ole Doc. “It’s too strong. I’m satisfied. Let’s go.”
Tinoi grunted with relief and started down. Then he changed his mind and stood aside to let Ole Doc into the elevator first. But Tinoi went just the same. He went very inert with a beautiful uppercut to hoist him and lay him down against the far wall.
Ole Doc rubbed his gloved knuckles as he turned Tinoi over with his foot. The cranial structure told him much. Tinoi had been born and bred in the slums of Earth.
“Ragweed,” said Ole Doc. “Common, ordinary ragweed. And the older a race gets, the more it suffers from allergies. Tinoi, Connoly, Big Lem himself—Earthmen.” He was searching Tinoi’s pockets now and he came up with a drug so ancient and common that at first he didn’t recognize it and thought it was cocaine.
The analyzer set him right.
“Benadryl!” said Ole Doc in amazement. “Ragweed, and here’s benadryl. Earthman to begin with and not very susceptible. Benadryl to keep him going and to prevent a serious case of asthma. Air—asthma—oxygen for asthma, benadryl for asthma— But it can’t be air in those bombs. It wasn’t benadryl.”
He pushed “Basement” and descended. The door opened on a storeroom guard. He took Tinoi’s blaster and put a neat and silent hole through the Persephon guard who stood outside the basement storeroom. The guard had alerted, had seen the body on the floor when the elevator opened and had not had time to shoot first. Ole Doc shot the lock off the storeroom door.
And it was there that he came afoul of another ancient custom.
A bell started ringing faintly somewhere in the upper regions of the building. For a moment he was not alarmed, for he had safely bypassed all the offices in the elevator. And then he saw a wire dangling, cut by the opened door. An old-fashioned burglar alarm!
He grabbed up a black bomb with its AL lettering and sprinted for the elevator. But the door closed before he got there and the car went up without him, carrying Tinoi’s unconscious message.
Ole Doc was shaken into the mistaken idea that this place was further guarded by gas, for he began to sneeze. Then he saw that his helmet was not sealed tight and hastily repaired it. Ragweed. He was sneezing from the solution of pollen which still stained his glove. A heavier dose would have left him gasping, and as it was, his eyes watered and he staggered as he fumbled for the stair door.
It crashed toward him and three Persephons leaped out of the areaway. It was not fair to them just as it had not been fair to their brothers that morning. Ole Doc gripped the searing-hot blaster, picked up the weapons of the first fallen one, stepped over the other two bodies and started on up the stairs. The top door was locked and he shot it open.
The clerks screamed and thrust back away from him, for they saw murder in his old-young eyes.
Big Lem was frozen in his office entrance. The burglar alarm gonged clang-clang-clang with furious strength over them all.
“What’s in this?” shouted Ole Doc, thrusting out the bomb.
“Put that gun down!” bawled Tolliver. “What the devil’s wrong—”
Ole Doc heard in his keyed-up phone the tiny whisper of leather above the clanging gong. He spun sideways and back and the shot intended for him fired the wood beside Big Lem Tolliver.
Connoly, the gunner, was ponderously wheeling for a second shot. Ole Doc snapped a quick one across his chest. Connoly’s face vanished in a dirty black gout of smoke. He somersaulted backwards down the front steps and landed, dead but still writhing, in the midst of the slaves he had not had time to herd away and now would herd no more.
Ole Doc was still skipping backwards to avoid a counterattack by Big Lem. The elevator door clanged shut and Tolliver was gone.
Ole Doc headed for the stairs and took them four at a time, cloak billowing out behind him. He had wasted too much time already. But he couldn’t leave this building until— They weren’t on the second floor. Nor the third. But the switch box for the elevator was. Ole Doc shattered its smooth glass with a shot and finished wrecking it with another. Voltage curled and writhed and smoke rose bluely.
That done he went on up with confidence. The only Persephons he found fled down a fire escape in terror. Ole Doc went on up. The roof door was barricaded and he shot it in half.
Big Lem Tolliver might have been the biggest man on Arphon but he didn’t have the greatest courage. He was backing toward the “machine” and holding out his hands to fend off a shot as though they could.
“You’re not playing fair!” he wailed. “You see the racket and you want it all. You’re not playing fair! I’ll make it halves—”
“You’ll face around and let me search you for a gun,” said Ole Doc. “And then we’ll get about our business. You’ve violated—”
“You want it all!” wailed Tolliver, backing through the door of the dome. He tried to shut it quickly but Ole Doc blew the hinges off before it could close.
The shot was too close for Tolliver’s nerves. He leaped away from it, he stumbled and fell into a vat.
He screamed and quickly tried to grab the edge and come out. Ole Doc stopped, put down the bomb and dropped a stirring stick to the man’s rescue.
Tolliver grabbed it and came out dripping, clothes with green scum running off them hanging ridiculously upon him. The man was trying to speak and then could not. He clawed at his eyes, he tried to yell. But with each breath he sucked in quantities of poison and his tortured skin began to flame red under the scum.
Ole Doc threw the bomb at his feet where it burst in bright green rays. He expected Tolliver to breathe then, wreathed in the climbing smoke. But Tolliver didn’t. He fell down, inarticulate with agony and lack of breath, and within the minute, before Ole Doc could find means of tearing the clothes from him and administering aid now that the AL air bomb had not worked at all, Big Lem Tolliver was dead.
In the elevator Tinoi still lay, struggling now to come up from his nightmare. When he saw Ole Doc standing over him, Tinoi’s own gun in hand, the lieutenant of the late Air, Limited could not be convinced that any time had passed. But he was not truculent, not when he saw Tolliver’s body. He could not understand, never would understand, the sequence of these rapid events. But Tolliver was dead and that broke Tinoi.
“What do you want wif me?” he sniveled.
“I want you to set this place to rights eventually. Meantime, shut off that confounded machine and come with me.”
Tinoi shut it off and the ripples in the vats grew still. Ole Doc hiked down the steps behind the cringing Tinoi and so into the main offices on the ground floor.
The clerks stared at the cringing Tinoi.
“You there,” said Ole Doc. “In the name of the Universal Medical Society, all operations of Air, Limited are ordered to cease. And find me this instant the whereabouts of Bestin Karjoy, extraracial being.”
The clerks stared harder. One of them fell down in a faint.
“The Univ . . . The Universal Medical Society . . .” gaped another. “The real one. I told him I thought he was a Soldier,” whimpered the clerk who had first announced it. “When I read that article— Now I’ll never get my weekly check—”
Ole Doc wasn’t listening. He had Tinoi and another clerk by the collars and they were going down the ste
ps, over the dead Connoly, through the moaning slaves and up the avenue at a rate which had Tinoi’s feet half off the ground most of the way.
At ten thousand miles an hour, even freighted with her passengers and the thousand kilos of Bestin and his antennae-waving father, the gig did not take long to reach the injured Morgue.
Bestin’s father was making heavy weather of trying to unload the bundles he had brought when the gig landed and Ole Doc hurriedly helped him. The old extraracial being hobbled on ahead into the operating room of the Morgue and then, when Ole Doc would have come up, he found himself heavily barred outside by eight hands. The door clanged shut, didn’t quite meet at the bottom, bent and was shut anyway.
Ole Doc stood outside in the trampled grass and stared at the Morgue. The girl on her stretcher was forgotten. Tinoi and the clerk might as well have been grass blades.
Tinoi grumbled. He knew that he could run away but where could he run to escape the long arm of a Soldier of Light? “Why didn’t you tell me?” he growled at the clerk. “You punks are supposed to know everything—”
“Be quiet,” said the clerk.
There was a sound inside as of plumbers’ tools being dropped. And then the clatter of pipes. A long time passed and the sun sank lower. Ole Doc came out of his trance and remembered the girl.
She was moaning faintly from the pain of her burns.
Ole Doc timidly knocked on the door of his operating room. “Please. Could I have the red case of ointments on the starboard wall?”
He had to ask three times before Bestin’s two right arms shot impatiently out with the red case. Ole Doc took it and the door clanged shut again.
The girl shuddered at the first touch and then a hypo pellet quieted her. Ole Doc worked quickly but absently, one eye on the ship. Tinoi gaped at what Ole Doc was doing and the clerk was ill.
The girl did not move, so strong was the pellet, even when half the skin was off her face and arm. Tinoi had to turn away, rough character though he called himself, but when the click and scrape of instruments didn’t sound again, he faced back.
Ole Doc was just giving the girl another shot. She was beginning to stir and turned over so that Tinoi could see her face. He gaped. There wasn’t a trace of a scar, not even a red place where the scar had been. And the girl was very, very beautiful.
“Feel better?” asked Ole Doc.
She looked around and saw the clearing. She recalled nothing of the in-between. She did not know she had been to Minga and back and thought she had that minute finished dragging Doc from the burning ship. She sat up and stared around her. It took a little soothing talk to convince her of what had happened.
She saw Ole Doc’s mind was not on what she was saying nor upon her and she soon understood what was going on in the ship.
“Someone you like?” she asked.
“The best slave any man ever had,” said Ole Doc. “I recall . . .” But he stopped, listening. “The best slave a man ever had,” he finished quickly.
The sun sank lower and then at last the clicking and chanting inside the ship had stopped. The door opened very slowly and the old man came out, carrying his clumsy bundles. He put them in the gig. In a moment, Bestin came down the twisted ladder and walked stolidly toward the gig.
Ole Doc looked at them and his shoulders sagged. He rose and slowly approached the old being.
“I understand,” said Ole Doc, finding it difficult to speak. “It is not easy to lose . . . to lose a patient,” he finished. “But you did your best, I know. I will fly you back to Min—”
“No, you won’t!” howled Hippocrates, leaping down from the Morgue. “No, you won’t! I will do it and you will tell those two stupid humans there and that woman to put things to rights in that ship they messed up. Put them to rights, you bandits! Wreck my Morgue, will you! She’s more human than you are!”
He shook four fists in their faces and then turned to beam affectionately at Ole Doc.
The little fellow was a mass of fresh plaster of Paris from neck to belt but otherwise he was very much himself. “New pipes,” he said. “Whooeee, whoooo, whoooo!” he screamed, deafening them. “See? New pipes.”
Ole Doc saw and heard. He sat down on the grass weakly and began to laugh. Hippocrates was offended. He did not know that this was from the shock of his own near demise, from the close shave of never getting aid to him. He did not know that the biggest swindle in a thousand systems had had to relax its wealthy sway before he could be cured. He was offended.
“Clean up that ship!” he shouted, jumping into the gig. “And as for you,” he declaimed, pointing at his beloved master, “don’t you touch that cake. The birthday party will be at six. You invite girl but those stupid humans, never! I go now. Be right back.”
And the gig shot tremendously away.
Ole Doc wiped away the tears of near hysteria and took one of his own pills. He got up. “You better do what he says, people. And as for you, Tinoi, tomorrow morning we’ll shut off and destroy those ‘machines’ and get this planet running again. Jump now. You heard him.”
The clerk and the girl—who gave Ole Doc a lingering, promising glance—entered the ship to begin their work. But Tinoi lingered. “Better jump,” said Ole Doc.
“Sure. I’ll work,” said Tinoi. “But one thing, Mister Doctor . . . you’re a Soldier of Light and I ain’t even good enough to talk to you, I know. But—”
“Well?”
“Sir,” plunged Tinoi. “It’s them bombs. We had our allergy pills, but them bombs was pretty good, too. If they’re so expensive to make like he said, how’ll we ever get enough to cure up—”
“My man,” said Ole Doc, “your precious bombs were one of the oldest known buncombes in medical history. A propellant and ephedrine, that’s all. Ephedrine barely permits the allergy patient to breathe. It wasn’t ‘air’ you were selling but a phony, second-rate drug that costs about a dollar a barrel. They’d take a little and needed more. You were clear back in the dark ages of medical history—about a century after they’d stopped using witches for doctors. Ragweed, ephedrine—but they were enough to wreck the lives of nearly everyone on this planet.
“Oh, get into the ship and get busy. It makes me sick to think of it. Besides, if Hippocrates gets back and finds his Morgue still messed up, he’ll make you wish you’d never been born. Jump now, for by all that’s holy, there’s the gig coming back now.”
Plague
The big ship settled in the landing cradle, her ports agleam—and her guts rotten with sickness. There were no banners to greet her back from her Spica run, there was no welcoming mass of people. The field was as still as an execution dock and the black wagons waited with drivers scared, and the high yellow blaze of QUARANTINE hung sickly over all.
Five hundred and ninety-one passengers were dead. The remainder of her list would probably die. Officers and crew had contributed to the dead. And somewhere between Spica and Earth, corpses had been flung out the spaceport to explode in vacuum and gyrate, then, perhaps, as dark comets of putrescent matter around some darker star.
The medic at the port, authoritative but frightened, barked into the speaker, “Star of Space ahoy! No personnel or equipment will be given to you until a full accounting of symptoms has been given by your ship’s doctor.”
An officer’s voice speakered out from the Star of Space. “The doc’s dead! Let us open the ports! Help us!”
“How does the disease appear to you?”
There was a long silence and then another voice answered from the stricken Star. “Begins with sore throat and spots inside the mouth. Swollen throat and then steadily mounting temperature. Death comes in convulsions in about fourteen days, sometimes less. If you’ve got a heart, let us land. Help us!”
The group on the operations platform looked out at the defiled cradle. The medic was young but old enough to know hopelessness. The Spaceway Control police chief, Conway, looked uncertainly at the ship. Conway knew nothing about medicine but he knew what had
happened when the Vestal from Galaxy 159 had brought the red death here.
“What they got?” asked Conway. “Red death?”
“I don’t know. Not that.” And the medic asked other things of the ship.
“You must have some idea,” said Conway.
“I don’t know,” said the medic. He turned to a phone and called his superiors and when he came back he was haggard.
A woman had come to the ship speaker now. She was pleading between broken sobs. They were trying everything they could out there in that ship. The medic tried to imagine what it was like with those closed ports. No doctor. The ballrooms and salons turned over to dying men, women and children. The few live ones cringing in far places, hoping. Brave ones waiting on sick people. Some officer with his first command which would be his last. They had a kid at the ship speaker now.
Conway asked them for verbal messages and for an hour and a half the recorder took them. Now and then the speaker on the ship would change.
Mulgrave, president of Spaceways Intergalactic, Inc., owner of the Star of Space, came and looked on.
At 10:72 sidereal galaxy time, Conway took the dispatcher’s mike and ordered the ship away.
There were protests. Conway did not answer or repeat his order. Slowly the protests, the pleas, vanished. Sullenness marked the ship then. For a long while nothing stirred. But at 11:24 a converter began to whine. At 11:63 the tubes gave a warning blast. At 11:67 the Star of Space lifted from her cradle, hovered and then slowly rose spaceward, doomed.
Ole Doc Methuselah arrived on Earth at 19:95, five days after. He arrived and Earth knew it. Ole Doc was mad. Ole Doc was so mad that he bypassed quarantine and control and landed square before the hangar, gouging big chunks of dirt up with the Morgue’s landing blast.
A dispatcher came racing on a scooter to know what and why and he had his mouth open to become a very mad dispatcher when he saw the crossed ray rods. They were on the nose of the golden ship and they meant something. The same insignia was on the gorget at Ole Doc’s throat. The ray rods of pharmacy. The ray rods of the Universal Medical Society which, above all others, ruled the universe of medicine, said what it pleased, did what it pleased when it pleased and if it pleased. It owed allegiance to no government because it had been born to take the deadly secrets of medicine out of the hands of governments. The dispatcher shut his mouth.